Binaries for public testing

The directory http://labs.seravo.fi/~otto/mariadb-repo/ is browseable and there you can find build logs and both binary and source packages. Build logs have the git hash appended so it is possible to track build logs per commit.

Latest test packages can be installed after adding the sources.list line corresponding to your distro:

Building yourself

Basically you can just run gbp-clone --pristine-tar git://github.com/ottok/mariadb-X.git to check out the code in all branches and then run git-buildpackage --git-pristine-tar to build directly on your own computer, on with --git-pbuilder to use separate chroot environments for installing build dependencies and building. Without pbuilder you need to manually install the build dependencies with apt-get.

TODO

Packaging background (historical info)

How MariaDB works

Simply writing apt-get install mariadb-server will install MariaDB 5.5.x and replace any existing MySQL 5.5.x installation and inherit the databases and configuration files of it. Installing mysql-server will do the opposite. However running mysql-server might raise issues if my.cnf contains something MariaDB-specific or if the database files have some MariaDB-specific table metadata. In those cases MySQL should fail gracefully by simply refusing to start until conditions are correct.

Most MariaDB packages have in the control files Provides+Breaks+Replaces for equivalent MySQL packages, so that it is impossible to install both at the same time. Many of the packages contain the same (and thus conflicting) file names and paths as in equivalent MySQL packages.

Upstream MariaDB 5.5.x advertises to be a binary-compatible replacement for MySQL 5.5.x (but not anymore for MySQL 5.6 vs. MariaDB 10.0). Anything that works with MySQL 5.5 will work with MariaDB 5.5. Migrating from MySQL 5.5 to MariaDB 5.5 will always work. The contrary might not always be true, as at least MariaDB 5.5 libraries (/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libmariadbclient.so.18.0.0) have more symbols (e.g. async support) than the MySQL version and some MariaDB enhanced database tables may be unreadable by MySQL 5.5.

Possible "interfaces" of MySQL 5.5 are the server and client binaries (can be used e.g. in shell scripts), the actual server interface (used remotely via port 3306 or locally via socket /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock) and the binary interfaces (/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libmysqlclient.so.18 and some symbolic links to it, installable from package libmysqlclient18). MariaDB has all of these interfaces, plus the extra libmariadbclient18.so.18.

As upstream MariaDB 5.5 is quite a young fork of MySQL, all of the internal file names still have mysql in them, the database files are in the same location, the configuration file /etc/mysql/my.cnf is the same, the port 3306 is the same etc.

In Debian packages, libmysqlclient.so.* has been renamed to libmariadbclient.so.* to enable both versions to be installable side-by-side. Initial checking did not find that MySQL nor MariaDB would themselves use the shared libs, but have their own libs statically linked in. These shared libs are meant only for third party usage, and the libs themselves will use whatever server is installed (MySQL or MariaDB). While libmysqlclient18 and libmariadbclient18 are co-installable, the -dev versions have files with same filenames and they conflict, thus making -dev versions NOT co-installable.

Mariadb-common is an empty metapackage that depends on mysql-common. MariaDB 5.5 can always use a my.cnf that originates from MySQL 5.5, but it might not work the other way around if the user has added some MariaDB-specific parameters in the my.cnf. The default my.cnf should always be compatible with all MySQL and MariaDB versions (5.5, 5.6, 10.0 and foreseeable future). Any options which are unique to one or the other must never appear in a shipped my.cnf.

To mitigate migration confusion, installing MariaDB will show a dialog notifying about the potential one-wayness of the migration.

As MariaDB stores data in /var/lib/mysql, there might be issues if somebody wants to run MySQL after using MariaDB for some time. We could ask upstream to copy /var/lib/mysql into /var/lib/mariadb to be on the safe side. In Debian installing MySQL after MariaDB could also be seen as a downgrade, and trigger the mariadb-server-5.5.preinst:77 downgrade warning. The current solution is simply to issue a warning at MariaDB installation time that the migration for some parts in a one-way migration.